Saturday, 28 March 2026

LIST 247 - 28/03/2026

Hello again,

On to this week's selections shortly.  I promise.  First of all, however, and for the second week running, it's a pleasure to be able to enthuse about a very, very good gig attended since the last we met.

Heavenly's storming set at Sheffield's redoubtable Sidney & Matilda last weekend will live long in the memory, delivering as it did everything one would hope a Heavenly set in the 2020s possibly would.  

A splendidly curated collection of tracks new (eight from Highway to Heavenly) and old (ten from the Sarah and Wiiija days), light and shade (no eschewing of the darker subject matter in the band's catalogue).  

Performers older, wiser, kindly and self-effacing, if nobody's fools.  Highly amusing, also; though following an adroit bit of on-stage trolling guitarist Peter Momtchiloff might just want to hope his day job with Lex Academic doesn't require him to visit either university in Sheffield any time soon.

A crowd both big and spread across the age range.  The enormous numbers of streams which the likes of P.U.N.K. Girl and Me and My Madness have been netting on TikTok and Spotify had played at least some role in driving Heavenly's return to active service.  It's not much of a reach to suggest that part of that newly found audience were in attendance here.

Validation, then, and in the most positive senses of the word, vindication also.  

And joy.  Lots of joy.  From the rapturous reception to opener Portland Town through to the delightfully genderblind reading of C Is The Heavenly Option, gig co-organiser and All Ashore!/Plouf! mainstay Elodie Ginsberg occupying the persona of Calvin Johnson for one night and possibly one night only.








(Heavenly - Sidney & Matilda, Sheffield 21/03/2026.  Pictures are author's own)

Tulpa were in fine form also, and if it's not too wide of the mark to suggest as much, the winning chug of 1980s era Wedding Present that I can detect in certain of their tracks came more to the fore live than on record.  They can consider themselves rightly pleased with their evening's work also.



(Tulpa - Sidney & Matilda, Sheffield 21/03/2026.  Pictures are author's own)

Just up the road the same evening at the Network, in the sort of timetable clash that used to give us Indietracks attendees aches of the head and heart, Gina Birch was by all accounts delivering a barnstorming set in support of The Au Pairs.  

I've been looking forward to finding a space for the lithe, addictive title track of Gina's 2023 album ever since this blog was reactivated, and this feels like the perfect moment to do that; something from the 2025 follow-up will also appear in due course.  If I'm even remotely as cool as Gina when I eventually hit my seventies, I'll be... well, astonished really.

Staying with things which take place in Sheffield, one of the absolute joys of rediscovering my mojo with all things music has been to invest more time in listening to The Breakdown, Sheffield Live's two-hour Saturday afternoon radio show dedicated to interesting new tracks. 

Usually the preserve of regular presenters and all-round good eggs Joel Rigler and Steve Vickers, Joel was instead joined a few weeks back by Ian Turley, the second All Ashore! member to get a mention this week already but invited to the show in his other guise as My Lo-Fi Heart, purveyor of (as his YouTube channel nicely puts it) lo-fi love songs for lo-fi lovers.

Two things in particular struck me in Joel's interview with Ian as regards approaching blog writers with new tracks.  This is where you all scream at me that this sharp practice has been going on since Jesus was in short trousers, but Ian noted that plenty of music bloggers out there demand payment from an act before consenting to write about their music.

Seriously?  Hand on heart, in seventeen years of maintaining That Music List, on and off, the thought of asking potential contributors for money has never even remotely entered my head.  I'm genuinely just thrilled whenever I alight upon something I love sufficiently to want to include.  That feels like payment enough for me.

Secondly, Ian meditated briefly on how siloed genre-wise so many blogs still appear to be, citing the personal experience of his tracks having been liked by some bloggers, but not included on their blogs for being too EDM for the indiepop kids and vice versa.  

Good grief.  There are acts out there who have made the melding of those sorts of styles pretty much their modus operandi.  Joel quickly gave the example of Fujiya & Miyagi, veterans of nine albums and a smattering of TML appearances, and that's an excellent shout.

Suffice it to say, Ian, that this is a blog which is not remotely troubled by how great a degree of genre cross-pollination there may or may not be in your material.  It all sounded great at Hatch before Xmas, both tracks played on The Breakdown likewise, and it's nothing but a pleasure to be able to include We Can't Fail this week.



(My Lo-Fi Heart - Hatch, Sheffield 20/12/2025.  Pictures are author's own)

If 2025-26 has given the aforementioned Heavenly more than they could ever have dreamed of, broadly similar must also be true of Prolapse, spasmodically active for about a decade (my spreadsheet tells me it was June 2015 when I saw them in Nottingham) before finally aligning their diaries sufficiently to make a proper crack at a comeback in 2024.

As well as genuinely delighting the band, the anointing of On The Quarter Days as Dandelion Radio's number one in the 2025 Festive Fifty just felt right - a reminder to those Johnny-come-lately peddlers of sprechgesang over choppy guitars (hello, Yard Act) that somebody else was doing it earlier, and better.

This week's A Session of Sorts takes in four tracks from the length and breadth of the career of "the most depressing band ever" (their words), starting with the lead from their second ever EP and concluding with another highlight from last year's I Wonder When They're Going to Destroy Your Face.  

It's not vocalist Linda Steelyard's face which is currently destroyed, but rather her right foot, following a recent accident on her stairs at home.  Nevertheless, pot or not, expect her to be holding her own, and still responding in kind when Mick Derrick gets right in her face, when they play Hebden Bridge, Birmingham and the Wales Goes Pop festival at the start of April.

Meanwhile, My Forgotten 80s... this week lands upon the sad story of Scottish popsters and former Fire Engines alumni Win.  

All set for a sizeable hit with their McEwans beer advert-soundtracking You've Got the Power, an intervention from then chart compilers Gallup incorrectly attributed their strong local sales to illegal hyping of the track in Scottish record stores. 

A further theory I've seen doing the rounds, namely that only so many sales from Scottish bands per week were counted, and that Simple Minds' Don't You Forget About Me hoovered up most of that allocation, might be tempered to an extent by the fact that track was on its way down the charts and ranked no higher than #68 during You've Got the Power's two weeks in the very basement of the top 100.  Put simply, it alone won't have been preventing a five-figure number of sales for Win from being registered.

A real shame, all things considered.  Stripped of all of the association with the advert, and those chart machinations and manipulations, it's still a belting track all these years on and deserved better.

Other highlights this week are not in short supply, but you might be particularly interested in:

  • A reminder of the joy of early 2000s Japanese one-album wonders Yumi Yumi.  Having never attended anything like Primavera Sound, they'd be one of very few bands I can claim to have seen do a set on a beach, courtesy of a short-lived festival on the sands which coincided with my time living and working in Scarborough.  Other than Belle and Sebastian's visit to the now sadly demolished Futurist Theatre a few years prior (which did spill out onto the beach for a signing session afterwards), this would be as much indiepop as the town offered me back then - trips to Leeds and London filled in the sizeable gaps.  They were certainly the only act I ever saw in Scarborough - or anywhere else - who insisted a teddy bear on stage with them was a bona fide third member of the band, apparently operating the drum machine on their behalf.
  • A reminder that The Montgolfier Brothers were, and always will be, more than the sum total of a David Gilmour endorsement and cover.  Like so many before him, from Nick Drake to Tim Smith, how I wish that the upturn in the appreciation of Roger Quigley's work could have been enjoyed during the artist's actual lifetime.
  • A reminder that, love them as I do, mid-late 1990s female DIY/indiepop/punk bands from the north east didn't start and finish with Kenickie.  Not by a long chalk.  There have been a number of contemporaneous acts featured on here over the years from the Slampt label in particular, but you also need Scooter Swing/Underwear recording artistes Delicate Vomit in your lives.  Here you go. 
  • An unflinching story of alcoholism by The Handsome Family, as featured in Christy Moore's 2006 covers album Burning Times.  Moore's talents for picking just the right songs to reinterpret seldom lets him down, and when I next get round to doing another List comprised solely of cover versions (it's been a while) I'll be astonished if he doesn't get a look-in.
  • This week's most poignant moment, a tribute to the recently parted Danny Coughlan, and a track which itself was made in memory of Tracyanne Campbell's late Camera Obscura colleague and friend Carey Lander.

J xx


Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 27/03/2026).



A TANGLE OF JANGLE


A SESSION OF SORTS: Prolapse



IF WE DO, WE’LL KEEP IT ALIVE


MY FORGOTTEN 80s IS MORE FORGOTTEN THAN YOUR FORGOTTEN 80s


A SESSION OF SORTS: Prolapse

[Sorry, no video available - please click on this Bandcamp link]



I LOVE POP MUSIC AND I WILL FIGHT YOU

IN LOVING MEMORY: Danny Coughlan

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Saturday, 21 March 2026

LIST 246 - 21/03/2026

Hello again,

After the reams and reams of previous weeks, there's a bit less to say ahead of this week's List.  

A good opportunity, therefore, to make mention of the fact that I've been back to the very first List, originally published on February 15th 2009, and given it - for want of a better expression - a complete service.  As is only to be expected seventeen years on, plenty of the links needed replacing; but rather than just do that, I embedded all of the videos within the blog post in the same way I've done since the start of this year.

Feel free to click here and take a look.  List #1 has never looked better, as far as I'm concerned, and there's not a single choice in that initial selection that I don't still stand by today.  Winners all, if some of them don't get played by me these days as often as they still deserve.  I've let things slip with Circulus and Alela Diane in particular.  Oops.

I expect I'll give some more old Lists a revamp as time and resource permits.  But what of this week's assortment, though?

By the time many of you will read this, I'll have been back to Sidney & Matilda to watch the Sheffield leg of the resurgent Heavenly's multinational tour, supported on this occasion by their Skep Wax signees Tulpa.  

The band's return was meditated upon sufficiently back in List #240, so it's perhaps enough for now to say I'll be curious to see whether the gig packs the same emotional charge for me as Cardiacs did last week.  Both, ultimately, are bands originally chopped off in their prime by tragedy and now making a live and recorded reappearance which seemed unlikely for most of the intervening period.

Either way, from a gig-going perspective this represents the final piece of the Amelia-fronted indiepop act jigsaw for me.  I've seen Marine Research, Tender Trap and The Catenary Wires, and I'm totally counting Amelia Fletcher and Eithne Farry's impromptu set in the merchandise tent of the 2009 Indietracks festival as a live sighting of Talulah Gosh.  Everybody else there at the time evidently does.


(Talulah Gosh - Indietracks Festival 26/07/2009.  Picture is author's own, from as close to the front of the merch tent as I could get, i.e. not very).

Although the same acts were not generally permitted to appear in the main Indietracks line-up two years running, Amelia - who'd been there in 2009 with Tender Trap as well as Talulah Gosh - managed to make an appearance in 2010 as well, performing extensive vocal and placard-waving duties during The Pooh Sticks' comeback gig.  The working relationship with chief Stick Huw Williams endures to the present day in the guise of Swansea Sound, of course.

Elsewhere on that year's line-up could be found Veronica Falls, whose magnificently doomy, foreboding take on indiepop hasn't been represented as often on my Lists as it deserves.  In common with the Gabrielles Wish track of the other week, Beachy Head is one I'm astonished I've let go without inclusion up until now.  

Ditto, if not all the more so, the clanking DIY indietronica of the superb C-C by Tom Vek, a track disqualified from the Favourite Song feature solely on the technicality of me not having heard it for the first time until a year after its 2005 release.  If only, if only.  It must be my most played track of that year.

As always, everything else in this week's selection is entirely worthy of your attention also.  If I can draw your attention to a few of them in particular, they'd be:

  • The antidote to banal, we're-gonna-win-the-cup football songs, in the form of Cha Cha 2000's bagpipe drones, strangled samples and cardboard box drum machine.  A side project of Prolapse's Mick Derrick and Pat Marsden, this is a long way from the last we'll be hearing from these particular gentlemen in the short term.
  • A selection from Jean Leloup, picked up at the time and enthused over by BBC2's much-loved Snub TV strand.  Whether the primary appeal was the notion of Francophone baggy, or rather the relative edginess of Leloup's lyrical comparison of his sex life to Operation Desert Storm, is nothing to which I've found a definitive answer.
  • As tucked away as one of the b-sides of the singles compilation-plugging new track Glam Rock Cops, a cover of one of Carter's earlier singles by Sultans of Ping (the FC was officially omitted from sleeves at the time, but that didn't necessarily prevent its use).  Both bands were slowly declining commercial forces by the time of this track's early 1994 release, but that doesn't make the Sultans' barnstorming run-through any less compelling.
  • The contribution of Red Monkey (two thirds of whom now comprise two thirds of Knitting Circle, q.v. List #242) to a 2000 split single with Canadian DIY punks Submission Hold, the other half of which really ought to be included on here some day also.

(Red Monkey -  Night & Day, Manchester 30/09/1997.  Picture is author's own)



(Red Monkey - Cumberland Arms, Newcastle 08/07/2000.  Pictures are author's own)
  • A song by New Bad Things which isn't 1993 era Peel favourite (and Festive Fifty entry) I Suck.
  • An early reminder that BMX Bandits will be performing at the valedictory Pop at the Lock Festival in Middlewich, Cheshire, this coming July.  See you there?
  • A slow, engaging reveal over more than nine minutes from Yo La Tengo, taken from the Electr-O-Pura album which just about remains my favourite of theirs, even three decades on.
J xx


Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 20/03/2026).




FABRIQUÉ EN FRANCE

THEN AND NOW: Cocorosie
  



IF WE DO, WE’LL KEEP IT ALIVE

NO LANGUAGE IN OUR LUNGS



YES, THEY DID OTHER SONGS AS WELL

SCIENTISTROCK




THE LONG GOODBYE

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Saturday, 14 March 2026

LIST 245 - 14/03/2026 (Feature Fest #1)

Hello again,

This week's List finds your writer still with ringing ears and a happy heart from witnessing the Manchester leg of Cardiacs' emotional and triumphant return, with erstwhile Oceansizer Mike Vennart permanently installed in the live set-up now as well as on record.  

The Albert Hall's variable sound quality - partly the consequence, I'm given to understand, of its high ceiling and many windows, beautiful as they are - couldn't prevent the magic of this strange, beautiful, sometimes manic music shining through, and it's worth stressing that compiling and executing this near two-hour set so perfectly was no small undertaking, even for those who'd performed some of its contents for decades previously.  

These are still earlyish days for drummer Bob Leith performing without any of the backing tracks which the late Tim Smith had introduced upon the band's early-1990s conversion to a power quartet, and had kept in place as the live ensemble expanded and right up until the tragic events of 2008.  Live keyboards hadn't especially featured in Cardiacs' live offer for at least 35 years, either, until Rhodri Marsden was brought on board; something else for Bob, Kavus Torabi and Jim Smith to get used to.

Inevitably, though, it was Vennart who has carried the greatest responsibility to make things work as the band's de facto frontperson now, to all intents and purposes the Tim of the piece however much he has striven to play down that perception.

Has he succeeded? Kavus's succinct summary on Facebook yesterday morning that, "Mike has excelled, taking on the almost impossible task of inhabiting these songs with authenticity and passion, not to mention extraordinary ability and talent", tells you enough.

This was not the Mike Vennart show, neither was it Mike doing Tim Smith cabaret - no replication of any of Tim's eccentric outbursts, nor any of the theatrical humiliating of Jim (indeed, Jim got a cuddle or two from Mike and Kavus). Instead, generous tributes to his fellow players and audience during the set, culminating in the outro of The Whole World Window, which rounded off the main set. Flowers thrown from the stage (a nod to the Consultant or Mrs Swift, one assumes - IYKYK), and respectful hug of a picture of Tim Smith himself.

The octet on stage looked absolutely spent by the time Is This The Life? drew the second and final encore to a close, Mike and Jim especially. The latter had, some will remember, been unable to complete the final Sing to Tim gig in late 2024 due to illness, but it was emotional investment rather than physical frailty at play here.

By the end of this week Cardiacs will have played four equally long gigs within five nights, and the time required to rest, recover and reflect will be well earned.

Jim has often mentioned that it felt as if Cardiacs were on the cusp of something approaching a crossover, relatively speaking, back in 2007 judged on the size and increasingly varying age profile of their audiences; and the evidence of the rapturous responses to these sell-out dates is that those people have not only waited and returned, but been appreciably added to in number.

The question for Jim Smith to consider, at leisure, will be what happens next.

There are supposedly further remnants of music and lyrics from Tim's archives which could yet be spun into gold in the same way as the LSD album and ultimately performed live.

Equally, and even factoring in the performances of all three tracks on the Ditzy Scene single this week and/or in 2007-8, exactly half of LSD will have remained unplayed to a live audience by the end of this current tour.  That includes such audacious tracks as Busty Beez and Skating - taking these on the road some day must have its appeal.

And, of course, there is a back catalogue of such depth that a staggering number of setlist permutations could still be drawn up for years to come, with or without contributions from LSD, and the faithful would likely still be more than satisfied with that.

All in good time. More immediately, I know that Thursday night's concert definitely finds a place among my all-time favourites. I just need to decide where.









(Cardiacs - Albert Hall, Manchester 12/03/2026.  Pictures are author's own)

**** 

In the circumstances, there was never the remotest chance that this week's List would pass without a Cardiacs contribution, and the aforementioned Busty Beez is included in the No Language In Our Lungs feature.  

Calling it my favourite Cardiacs instrumental would be damning it with faint praise, as instrumentals wouldn't be what they're first and foremost known for (true to the ethos of this particular feature).  

Calling it one of my favourite ever instrumentals of any description, however, is no exaggeration, so quickly and indelibly has it got its claws in me still only six months after release.  A persistent, writhing, dramatic maelstrom of guitars and Craig Fortnam's brass arrangements, it reveals further details and secrets with every listen.  It's incredible.

The more attentive among you will have spotted the Feature Fest suffix to this week's header, and sure enough, every single track in this List belongs to one of the features I've introduced or reintroduced since That Music List was reactivated in January.  

I maintain a portfolio of 25 different features covering as many different eras and genres as possible, and no fewer than 20 make an appearance this week, three of which for the first time.  With that, I'm pleased to say that every single feature has not only appeared at least once now, but has received some degree of coverage here within the past three weeks.  I just need to keep all these plates spinning now.

Of the newbies, I Love Pop Music And I Will Fight You is the only feature to have been thought up since this blog's relaunch, initially inspired by a quip from my friend and former boss Simon Rowlands as to when Taylor Swift might be making an appearance.  In truth, if Taylor Swift released a track I liked enough to include on a List, I would do so, and would do so unironically.

Until that eventuality, this feature includes other (mostly mass market) pop songs I do love unironically.  Good pop is good pop, wheresoever it comes from, and for whosoever it might be intended.  

I still recall most fondly the Strange Fruit indiepop nights that my brother and I would attend at Highbury Garage a quarter of a century ago, in which the occasional bit of S Club 7 or 5ive would nestle seamlessly among the perhaps more expected bill of fare, and be heard and danced to equally appreciatively.  

As guiding principles go, that has remained with me longer than most.  It also broadly informs the approach of our good friends Kev Birchall and Linda Yarwood, curators of Recordsville club evenings, organisers of the Pop at the Lock and Going up the Country indiepop alldayers, and tour DJs for the likes of Saint Etienne and Teenage Fanclub (all well as for our wedding reception).

All of this is probably too long a way of saying that whilst the initial choice for this feature is the bang up to date and commensurately cool pop of Hemlocke Springs, don't lose your mind if I decide it'll be turn of the century Kylie or even older Bananarama next time. My prerogative.

It's also my prerogative not to be in the habit of marking musicians' birthdays in That Music List, for if I started doing that I'd never stop.  However, having cued up Nena for inclusion in the latest instalment of my German language music feature, I've since remembered she turns 66 in ten days' time.

I hope it doesn't disappoint too many of you to learn that I was never going to use up a List slot on 99 Luftballons.  It's already sufficiently ubiquitous, and Nena Kerner has had a rather more rounded career and existence than the one monster hit and the ridiculous hysteria over her armpit hair that her fame amounted to in Britain.

Almost twenty studio albums for grown-ups, a handful more for children, TV and film work, mentoring and coaching on music contests, an autobiography, philanthropy, campaigning, and the setting up of a Sudbury model-type school.

A grandmother many times over she may be, but she's got no intention of retiring quietly, or as she puts it in my selection here, stopping being a Professional Teenager, any time soon.

A Loved Album this week probably ought to be re-dubbed An Album Loved By Almost Nobody Else Apart From Me, as I'm yet to find anybody else prepared to give Alright on Top by Luke Slater much in the way of credit.  

Perhaps it was just too different from what had been Slater's stock in trade prior to that, still techno at its core but more, as Slater himself described it, "an album of songs".  Perhaps the contributions from Ricky Barrow, former vocalist of The Aloof, were just too polarising - often deadpan where some might have preferred soaring, to offer a more striking juxtaposition between music and voice.  I'm guessing on both fronts, I freely admit.

It was a collaborative exercise never repeated, and there can't be too many other items in Slater's body of work that you can pick up online for a quid, so moderate is its apparent standing.  For all that, however, there wouldn't be many other releases from 2002 which I played as much at the time, still play as much now, and mostly know off by heart.  Work that one out.

Much else to enjoy this week, including but far from limited to:
  • In another new feature, Wir Sind die neuen Götter, Die Krupps pummel their way through one of the many such tracks that soundtracked my EDM / industrial / darkwave club night visits whilst living in Germany exactly three decades ago,
  • In the final new feature, Yes, They Did Other Songs As Well, we have something from Candy Flip that isn't a certain notorious cover version,
  • U2 in clearing a U2 sample shocker!  The peerless Tom Ewing has written fondly of Kiss AMC's almost DIY level enthusiasm winning out over actual rapping technique in this track, and it absolutely won't be the last time you'll see me endorse his every word of an opinion on these pages,
  • Three charts entries from this date in 1993, one of which you still hear rather more up to the present day than you do the others,
  • A theme tune which might just have been the stuff of Lucozade-quaffing, off from school with sickness-induced fever dreams for some of you (Structures Sonores Lasry-Baschet),
  • The forgotten (by some) '80s sound of sophisti-pop Mancs The Bernhardts, comprising one-third former John Cooper Clarke and Pauline Murray co-producer and two-thirds future Distant Cousins (whom we'll also catch up with on here one day),
  • Another perfect example of the Sabadell Sound Italo Disco archetype.  Spanish performer with an English stage name (David Lyme, or Jordi Cubino Bermejo to his mum)?  Check.  Long intro?  Check.  Me loving it to bits?  Check,
  • To finish, the sort of pneumatic, irreverent Happy Hardcore cover which will never not remind me of Peel and his enthusiasm for the genre (DJ Kaos).  Chicago ballads were never so tolerable...

J xx


Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 13/03/2026).

I LOVE POP MUSIC AND I WILL FIGHT YOU

DOCH DER COUNTDOWN LÄUFT


A LOVED ALBUM: Luke Slater - Alright on Top (2002)



GOODIER BEFORE WHILEY & LAMACQ


THEN AND NOW: Howling Bells



IF WE DO, WE’LL KEEP IT ALIVE

COMPILED BY CHET & BEE (AND SOMETIMES TIM)

EUROTASTIC

NO LANGUAGE IN OUR LUNGS

MY FORGOTTEN 80s IS MORE FORGOTTEN THAN YOUR FORGOTTEN 80s

I WAS AN ARMCHAIR RAVER




WIR SIND DIE NEUEN GÖTTER


A LOVED ALBUM: Luke Slater - Alright on Top (2002)



YES, THEY DID OTHER SONGS AS WELL

RAPPING SONGS

DANCE HALL AT PEEL ACRES

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LIST 247 - 28/03/2026

Hello again, On to this week's selections shortly.  I promise.  First of all, however, and for the second week running, it's a pleas...

  • LIST 245 - 14/03/2026 (Feature Fest #1)
    Hello again, This week's List finds your writer still with ringing ears and a happy heart from witnessing the Manchester leg of  Cardiac...
  • LIST 244 - 07/03/2026
    Hello again, “I don’t know who needs to hear this”, wrote one John Girgus in an open Facebook post in April 2022, “but Sarah Records is over...
  • LIST 237 - 24/01/2026
    So here we are, then - the first List since May 2018, and a few changes to note.   Firstly, a longer running time, upped from just under the...